But when we got it to the table, we all found Night far more fiddly to deal with than, say, Scheme. And it didn't just feel like the problem of getting to grips with a new mechanic: Reserve cards were a walk in the park by comparison.
Correct me if I'm wrong (because I'm pretending I know what you are talking about) but my experience was that what I found 'fiddly' with Night cards was how I kept doing my Clean-up
before my Night phase. Like, I'd discard all my cards from play, then play might Night cards, then be like, sorry, I need those cards to reference with my Night cards, I need to get them back out.
I'd do this regardless of whether the Night cards were Duration cards or not.
In practice, though, this isn't something bad with Night cards. This is a nigh-Pavlovian response to buying cards. I play Actions, then drop my hand of Treasures, then dump everything into the discard pile, often with the whole maneuver taking < 2 seconds. Then I have Night cards and have to rethink things.
Plus, I did this thing that a lot of people on Reddit did, where they/I assumed that Night cards that look like Actions play like Actions and the strategies of playing them are precisely the same. Then you play Night Watchman as a-dumb-clone-of-Cartographer-that-I-play-last and suddenly your brain comes to a screeching halt because you
don't play Night Watchman the same as Cartographer, it means differently.
Anyhow, forgive me if I'm totally on the wrong path, but I think that the fiddly side of Night cards all comes from it defying deeply-ingrained time-saving moves. I think the solution will be to learn new time-saving moves? I currently am pushing to always have a person who reads the Boons aloud, rather than handing the cards around the table (unless they say "keep until Clean-up" -- same with Hexes.)